The guide
Build it yourself on Wix if you have somebody with several genuinely free days, an eye for words and pictures, and a plan for who keeps it current a year from now. Hire a specialist if you do not, because on this decision the tool is not what separates a website that fills beds from one that sits there, and it has not been for a long time.
Updated September 2026
That is a less exciting answer than either side of this argument usually gives. Builders are not the cheap option that lets you down, and specialists are not the only route to a good site. What actually differs is who does the work, who makes the judgement calls, and who is still looking after it in month seven. In brief:
The honest starting point
Most agency content on this question quietly skips the first half of it, and skipping it makes everything that follows less believable. Before any of this matters, it is worth being clear about what a care home website has to get right before the platform matters.
Where it reaches its limit
What you are buying is a tool and a blank page. The ceiling is not quality, it is the three things the tool cannot supply: the hours to write and photograph the home properly, the judgement about what a frightened family needs to see and in what order, and somebody whose job it is to keep the site current once the excitement of launch has passed.
Those are three separate problems, and homes usually only anticipate the first one.
The three problems
Hours, judgement and maintenance. Each one sinks self-built care home sites for a different reason.
The building is the quick part. The writing and photography are not, and the people who could do them have the least time in the home. Skills for Care's report on the 2024/25 year found a registered manager vacancy rate of 11.4%, with 17.0% turnover.
A builder gives you an empty page. It does not tell you families want to know about dementia progression before your history, or that a photograph of an empty lounge reassures nobody. Care England and Log my Care's research with Sapio found reputation was the top decision factor at 30%, that 55% used directories and 40% used online search, and that only 19% used inspection reports (Care England, 2026).
The self-built site is usually excellent on launch day and untouched eighteen months later, because the person who built it has moved on and nobody else has the login. Mediahawk's spring 2026 report found calls to care homes rose 9% year on year while calls originating from care home websites grew just 1%.
The other side
Three things, and none of them is the software. Judgement about what families need to see, because somebody who has watched enquiries arrive knows the order the questions come in, and builds the pages in that order rather than in the order the home wants to talk about itself.
The craft parts you cannot do from a desk: words that sound like your home rather than a brochure, and photography or film of a working home that does not look staged. This is the hardest thing to do yourself, and the thing families judge fastest. Our films are always real residents, families and staff, never anything synthetic.
Somebody who is still there in month seven. A site with a named person responsible for it gets the new manager's photograph added, the vacancy page updated and the reviews refreshed. A site with nobody responsible does not.
Side by side
Both routes work. They fail differently, and they suit different homes. If you want the category question rather than the platform one, there is the wider version of this comparison, across builders generally.
| Build it yourself on Wix | Hire a specialist | |
|---|---|---|
| What you are buying | A tool and full control | Judgement, craft and someone accountable |
| Speed to live | Fast if the words and photos exist, slow if they do not | Predictable, because the writing and photography are part of the job |
| Quality of the finished site | Can be excellent. The platform is not the limit | Can be excellent. The difference shows in the content, not the code |
| What it costs you | A monthly subscription plus a lot of your own hours | A project fee, and very little of your time |
| Search visibility | Achievable, but you are learning it as you go | Built in from the start, if the supplier knows the sector |
| After launch | Depends entirely on somebody in the building keeping it up | Usually covered, and worth confirming in writing |
| Ownership | You own the words, images and domain, but the site lives on the subscription | Varies by supplier. Ask before you sign |
| Best for | A home with a capable, willing person who has real time | A home where nobody has the hours, or where the site has to work harder |
Directories, template builders and general web designers all do real work here, and plenty of good care home websites came from each of them. What none of them does on its own is decide what a frightened family needs to see first.
Cost and pace
They are priced on different models, which is why comparing the numbers directly is misleading. A builder is a subscription: a recurring platform charge that keeps the site online, with your own time as the unpriced part of the bill.
A specialist build is normally a one-off project fee, sometimes with a smaller ongoing hosting and support arrangement, and the price varies with scope: a refresh of an existing site sits at one end, a full build with a photography and film capture day at the other. Some suppliers work on a retainer that covers continuing changes, and a few tie part of the fee to results.
The questions that matter are not about the models at all. Ask what you own at the end, what happens on the day you stop paying, who can edit the site without going back to the supplier, and whether the content is included or quoted separately. Our own care home website builds set out what each one includes, and the specifics are walked through on a call.
On timing, a specialist build is usually the faster of the two in real elapsed time, which surprises people. A refresh can be live within about a week; a full build with a capture day takes longer, because filming and consent are arranged around the home rather than the other way round. A self-built site is fast to lay out and slow to finish. The layout takes an afternoon. The words and the photographs take the weeks, and they are the parts that stall.
The avoidable four
Four failures account for almost everything we see, two on each side.
Half the pages still say what the theme said. A family reads that as carelessness about everything else, and they are not entirely wrong to.
Excellent in 2024, the manager who built it has left, and no one knows the login. Old staff photographs, an old rating, a vacancy page that has not moved in two years.
Beautiful, and every small change is a request to a supplier who takes a fortnight. Homes stop asking, and the site ages exactly like the self-built one.
The most expensive mistake on this page. Moving to a new site without mapping the old addresses to the new ones throws away visibility the home already had.
The decision
Name the person and the hours. Not "someone will look at it". A name, and how many working days they genuinely have in the next month. If you cannot fill in both, the decision is already made.
Write the content first, whoever builds it. The six things families ask, answered plainly. If that document does not exist, no platform will save the site. If it does, either route will produce something decent.
Sort the photography honestly. Real pictures of your real home, or a plan to get them. Stock imagery of somebody else's building is the fastest way to lose a family who has already seen it on three other sites.
Decide who owns it in a year. Put a name against updates before you build anything. This single answer predicts whether the site still works in eighteen months better than any other.
Who it is for
Including the homes that should not do either of them yet.
If you have a capable, willing person with genuinely free days, a home with a clear story, and modest ambitions for search visibility to begin with. Homes in this position build good sites and should not be talked out of it.
If nobody has the hours, if the site needs to compete with well-marketed homes nearby, if you need photography or film of the home, or if you have already tried the self-build route and it stalled. That last one is the most common reason homes call us, and there is no embarrassment in it.
If families are not finding you at all. A new website will be a better version of something nobody sees, so if families are not finding you at all, that is a different job. Fix being findable first, then come back to this.
The middle path
Yes, and for a lot of homes it is the sensible order.
Build something honest and current now, learn what families actually ask, then rebuild in a year with evidence rather than guesses. Nothing is wasted, as long as one thing is done properly.
That thing is the move itself. Keep the same domain name, map every old page address to its new equivalent with permanent redirects, and carry over the page titles and text that were already earning visits. Do that and you keep everything you built. Skip it, and you start again from nothing, which is the only genuinely costly error available on this whole decision.
Common questions
Yes. Wix is a capable, fast, well-maintained platform and a care home website built on it can be excellent. W3Techs data from March 2026 put Wix on 4.3% of all websites worldwide, growing 32.6% year on year, and HTTP Archive's Core Web Vitals Technology Report had around three quarters of Wix sites passing all three mobile speed and stability measures in its November 2025 snapshot, ahead of most platforms. The tool is not the constraint. Time and judgement usually are.
Plan on several full working days spread over a few weeks, and expect the writing and photography to take longer than the building. Most managers who start one finish the layout quickly and then stall on the words and the pictures, which is where the enquiries actually come from. If those days are not genuinely free, the honest answer is that the site will sit half finished.
You own the words, the images and the domain name, but the site itself only exists while the subscription is paid, and it cannot be moved to another host as it stands. Ask any supplier or platform two questions before you commit: what exactly can I take with me, and what happens on the day I stop paying. The answers matter more than the monthly cost.
Three things a tool cannot do on its own: decide what a family needs to see and in what order, write and photograph a working home honestly, and keep the site current after launch. A builder hands you an empty page and full control. The judgement about what belongs on that page is the part families respond to, and it is learned from watching enquiries, not from a template.
Yes, and it is a reasonable plan. The one thing to get right is the move itself: keep the same domain, map every old page address to its new equivalent with permanent redirects, and keep the page titles and text that were already earning visits. Homes that rebuild without redirects usually lose search visibility for a few months, and that is the only expensive mistake in the whole exercise.
Keep reading
The same decision one level up, across template builders as a class rather than one named platform.
What a great care home website includesThe pages families actually read, the ones they never open, and what to fix first.
Is a directory profile enough?What a carehome.co.uk profile does well, where it stops, and what your own site has to do next.
